Cleopatra and Mark Antony died by their own hands, and Augustus was left master of Egypt and the Roman world (B.C. 30). Cæsarion, the son of Cleopatra and Julius Cæsar, was put to death, and Egypt was annexed to the emperor’s privy purse. It never, therefore, became a province of the Roman empire: unhappily for its inhabitants, it remained the emperor’s private domain. Its prefect was never allowed to be of higher rank than the equestrian order, and a senator was forbidden to set foot in it. Its cities could not govern themselves, and the old Greek law, which restricted the rights of citizenship to the Greeks and Jews and prevented any native Egyptians from sharing them, was left in force. Egypt was the granary of Rome, and the riches of its soil and the industry of its inhabitants made it needful that no rival to the reigning sovereign should establish himself in it. History had shown with what ease the country could be invaded and occupied and with what difficulty the occupier could be driven out. And the master of Egypt commanded the trade between East and West; he commanded also the Roman mob whose mouths were filled with Egyptian corn. It was dangerous to allow a possible rival even to visit the valley of the Nile.
The history of Alexandria under the Romans is the history of Alexandria rather than of the Egyptians. The _fellahin_ laboured for others, not for themselves, and the burdens which weighed upon them became ever greater and more intolerable. Now and again there were outbreaks in Upper Egypt, which were, however, quickly repressed, and in the third century the barbarian Blemmyes made Coptos and Ptolemais their capitals. The reconquest of the Thebaid by Probus (A.D. 280) was judged worthy of a triumph. About eight years later the whole country was once more in rebellion, and proclaimed their leader Akhilleus emperor. The war lasted for nine years, and the whole force of the empire was required to finish it. The emperor Diocletian marched in person into Upper Egypt and besieged Coptos, the centre of the revolt. After a long siege the city was taken and razed to the ground. But the war had ruined the people. The embankments were broken, the canals choked up, the fields untilled and overrun by the barbarians from the Sûdan or the Bedouin of the eastern desert. Diocletian, when the struggle was over, found himself obliged to withdraw the Roman garrisons south of the First Cataract, and to fix the frontier of the empire at Assuan.